Tom, Dick, and Harry recipe for hilarity at TLP

Timber Lake Playhouse’s area premier of “Tom, Dick, & Harry” is a roofers dream, there wasn’t a shingle complaint. If that tickles your funny bone, you’ll laugh hysterically at this TLP production.

Here’s the recipe for a funny comedy: take a young English couple expecting an interview with an adoption agency, his zany brother’s idea to plant body parts in the backyard, add a con-man brother and his illegal cigarettes and alcohol, top with a couple of illegal aliens in the house, and finish with the local constable poking around. Shake it up and throw it out on the stage. What you get is a perfect storm of bad timing and a very funny comedy.

I’ve never seen an actor work on stage as hard as Justin Sample as Tom Kerwood. He gets ballistic at he crazy brothers, Dick and Harry, and wears himself out keeping his wife, Linda (played deliciously by Meredith Gifford), from finding out. This is supposed to be “the happiest day of his life”. Sample is in every scene and you could feel his frustrations build before it all blows up in the second act when Mrs. Potter (Abby Haug) arrives for the adoption interview. Haug portrayed an equally frustrated character.

Both brothers, Dick and Harry, are all but oblivious to the tensions their poor brother is under. Just when you think the body parts are finally gone, in walks younger brother Harry (Ben Mason) carrying the garbage bag of parts. He was just as hilarious as he was in the previous performance of “Urinetown” as the gay assistant.

Well the lies continue to mount and start to trip poor Tom up even though his brothers are trying to keep it all straight (a very funny scene). Courtney Crouse plays the middle brother, Dick, a con man who keeps popping up, usually in trouble. He rents their upstairs bedroom. Crouse and Mason played off each other like Barnum and Bailey.

Lastly are Sean Riley and Sarah Dothage who play Andreas and the beautiful red-headed Katerina, a brother and sister who have found there way from Kosovo to this British living room and only speak Albanian (and a little sign language). Tom tries to keep them hidden but Andreas drinks too much smuggled alcohol and you can imagine what happens.

The only other characters are the Constable, played by Kyle Sandall, and Boris from the mafia, played by Christopher Russell. They completed the cast and tied up the loose ends.

Before I was a reviewer for TLP, if we only come to one show during the season, I chose the British farce. I knew my husband would love them and Tom, Dick, and Harry is no exception. TLP has a legacy of very funny British slapstick comedies. Get your tickets and go have a good laugh.

(by Barb Benson, theCity1.com)